93 Quotes by Norman Schwarzkopf

Moving into an unoccupied village when there's no opposition, I don't call that a military victory.

I'm not a type-B personality who knows I have a cancer growing inside of me and can live with the knowledge. I go into a kung-fu attack position when I go through the door of a hospital.

For the entire first part of my career, I prided myself on being unflappable even in the most chaotic of circumstances.

With a chemical alarm, you're going to build one that is oversensitive because you would rather the alarm go off and give you a false alarm than to err on the other side.

There's no doubt in my mind that whichever commander ordered the blowing up of Kamisiyah did so in following the instructions that he had received.

From the time I was twelve years old until I retired last year at the age of fifty-seven, the Army was my life. I loved commanding soldiers and being around people who had made a serious commitment to serve their country.

I can't even begin to visualize myself as a five-star general... When I think of the people who are five-star generals, I can't even see myself standing in their shadow.

How do you fight someone who doesn't care if they get killed? You accommodate them.

I think any student of military strategy would tell you that in order to attack a position, you should have a ratio of approximately 3 to 1 in favor of the attacker.

I am not one of these guys who is just going to waste American lives by throwing people needlessly in frontal attacks up against the enemy if I can avoid doing that.

When the Normandy Invasion was planned, a very specific strategic objective was given, and that strategic objective was the basis upon which the plan for the Normandy Invasion was derived.

Generals aren't in the business of commenting on the correctness or incorrectness of the President's decisions. Anybody who thinks he should be able to do that ought to be fired on the spot.

I have seen competent leaders who stood in front of a platoon and all they saw was a platoon. But great leaders stand in front of a platoon and see it as 44 individuals, each of whom has aspirations, each of who wants to live, each of whom wants to do good.

All you have to do is hold your first soldier who is dying in your arms, and have that terribly futile feeling that I can't do anything about it... Then you understand the horror of war.

I don't consider myself dovish and I certainly don't consider myself hawkish. Maybe I would describe myself as owlishthat is wise enough to understand that you want to do everything possible to avoid war.

I believe that forgiving them is god's function, our job is to arrange the meeting.

Choose to win

Get mad, then get over it.

They say the good Lord doesn't charge you for the days you hunt and fish, and I believe that.

A very great man once said you should love your enemies and that's not a bad piece of advice. We can love them but, by God, that doesn't mean we're not going to fight them.

Ninety-nine percent of leadership failures are failures of character.

What people don't understand is this is something that we only have in America. There is no other country in the world where the ordinary citizen can go out and enjoy hunting and fishing.

There's no other nation in the world where that happens. And it's very much a part of our heritage.

If we invade Iraq and the regime is very close to falling, I'm very, very concerned that the Iraqis will, in fact, use weapons of mass destruction.

Fish are a renewable resource, and one of the problems we've had is people feel obliged to catch the limit, then throw 'em in the garbage can.

I may have made my reputation as a general in the Army, and I'm very proud of that. But I've always felt that I was more than one-dimensional. I'd like to think I'm a caring human being.

The Patriot missile is a point defence missile. Point defence means that you put the missile at a location to defend a very specific target such as an airfield, a supply dump or a headquarters.

War's a profanity because, let's face it, you've got two opposing sides trying to settle their differences by killing as many of each other as they can.

War is a profane thing.

Carpet bombing tends to portray something that's totally indiscriminate, you know, en masse without regard to the target.

I am living proof that if you catch prostate cancer early, it can be reduced to a temporary inconvenience, and you can go back to a normal life.

Someone once asked, 'What is the difference between me and Saddam Hussein?' The answer is, 'I have a conscience and he doesn't.'

I'm not proud of killing, of being responsible for the death of a single person. I never will be.

It is God's job to forgive Osama Bin Laden. It is our job to arrange a face to face meeting.

I can stand in a crystal stream without another human around me and cast all day long, and if I never catch a single fish, I can come home and still feel like I had a wonderful time. It's the being there that's important.

I am quite confident that in the foreseeable future armed conflict will not take the form of huge land armies facing each other across extended battle lines, as they did in World War I and World War II or, for that matter, as they would have if NATO had faced the Warsaw Pact on the field of battle.

I've got to tell you what, the soldier doesn't fight very hard for a leader who is going to shoot him, okay, on his own whim. That's not what military leadership is all about.

I admire men of character and I judge character not by how men deal with their superiors, but mostly how they deal with their subordinates. And that, to me, is where you find out what the character of a man is.

I would never trust a man who didn't cry.

When placed in command -- take charge.

Do what is right, not what you think the high headquarters wants or what you think will make you look good.

When placed in command, take charge.

Tanks being deployed far forward is an indication of offensive action; tanks in depth is an indication of defensive action.

I've managed to convince my wife that somewhere in the Bible it says, 'Man cannot have too many shotguns and fishing poles.'

The truth of the matter is that you always know the right thing to do. The hard part is doing it.

Nobody can ever pin you down when you speculate.

The fun of fishing is catching 'em, not killing 'em.

It takes a hero to be one of those men who goes into battle.

I saw Kuwait many times before the war. I remember it as a beautiful place, full of very nice people, and it's a tragedy to see that somebody could set out to deliberately destroy a country the way the Iraqis have.

What people don't understand is this is something that we only have in America. There is no other country in the world where the ordinary citizen can go out and enjoy hunting and fishing. There's no other nation in the world where that happens. And it's very much a part of our heritage.

When I fish, I stop thinking about anything else. But truth be told, if you want to declare victories, I can tell you the fish have won a lot more than I have. It's interesting that something with a brain the size of a fish's can outsmart us humans, who think we are el supremo.

I get angry at a principle, not a person.

Going to war without France is like going hunting without an accordion.

Leadership is a potent combination of strategy and character. But if you must be without one, be without the strategy.

He is neither a strategist nor is he schooled in the operational arts, nor is he a tactician, nor is he a general. Other than that he's a great military man.

I do hunt, and I do fish, and I don't apologize to anybody for hunting and fishing.

First of all, Saddam did not win the war, even though he says he did, I mean, you know, that's a joke and everybody in the world knows it.

It doesn't take a hero to order men into battle. It takes a hero to be one of those men who goes into battle.

If Saddam were to be replaced tomorrow he would probably be replaced with someone who's just as bad or worse than he is.

I do not want to be a pawn in a political campaign.

To be an effective leader, you have to have a manipulative streak -- you have to figure out the people working for you and give each tasks that will take advantage of his strength.

You learn far more from negative leadership than from positive leadership. Because you learn how not to do it. And, therefore, you learn how to do it.

True courage is being afraid, and going ahead and doing your job anyhow, that's what courage is.

Good generalship is the realisation that you've got to figure out how to accomplish your mission with the minimum loss of human life.

I was lucky enough to lead a very successful war.

But I would defy anyone to go back over the years and tell me anyone whose career I've ruined, anyone whom I've driven out of the service, anyone I've fired from a job.

An awful lot has been written about my temper.

I like to say I'm not a hero.

What is postwar Iraq going to look like, with the Kurds and the Sunnis and the Shiites? That's a huge question, to my mind.

I'm not a politician. I'd make a lousy politician.

If it had been our intention to take Iraq, if it had been our intention to destroy the country, if it had been our intention to overrun the country, we could have done it unopposed.

I may have made my reputation as a general in the Army and I'm very proud of that. But I've always felt that I was more than one-dimensional.

I'd like to think I'm a caring human being.

It's nice to feel that you have a purpose.

Well, unfortunately, I have always regretted the fact that I have a temper, but I also have, you know, have great love and respect for all of the people that have worked for me. I think like everything else, this is one of those things that has been blown out of proportion.

Had we taken all of Iraq, we would have been like a dinosaur in the tar pit -- we would still be there, and we, not the United Nations, would be bearing the costs of that occupation.

Good generalship is a realization that... you've got to try and figure out how to accomplish your mission with a minimum loss of human life.

I hate war. Absolutely, I hate war.

As far as Saddam Hussein being a great military strategist, he is neither a strategist, nor is he schooled in the operational arts, nor is he a tactician, nor is he a general, nor is he a soldier. Other than that, he's a great military man, I want you to know that.

Any soldier worth his salt should be antiwar. And still there are things worth fighting for.

Unfortunately, if you've ever been in southern Georgia on the beaches in a lightning storm, if you're out there, you're in great, great danger, and you can be killed very, very quickly.

I am an environmentalist, but I'm not a wacko environmentalist. I believe that mankind and nature can live side-by-side for the mutual benefit of both.

The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war.

This gulf war syndrome thing is truly unfortunate, and I've met some of the vets who have this. These are my guys, and I feel terrible about it.

Hey, I'm not a politician. I'm a ham. I love to give speeches.

I prided myself on being unflappable even in the most chaotic of circumstances.

A professional soldier understands that war means killing people, war means maiming people, war means families left without fathers and mothers.